Weekly Franciscan reflections

Reflection for week of October 26th, 2025

Humility is truth  

At the end of last week’s reflection, it was mentioned that God asks us, his creatures, to exercise humility. So, we must understand humility – we cannot exercise a virtue that we do not understand.   

Do you believe that God knows us better than we know ourselves? As our creator, He is omniscient (He knows all), and he is omnipresent (He is everywhere). Therefore, God knows everything about us – he knows the truth of us.  

He knows our gifts, our weaknesses, our fears, our desires, and so on. It is sobering to think that God also knows every sin we have committed and every sin we will commit.  And yet, He calls us to be His disciples anyway.   

God exists outside of time and space (as we will, too, once in heaven) and so He has a much more complete perspective on us than we do on ourselves. To be humble means that we attempt to get to know ourselves as God knows us.   

To do this, we must be honest with ourselves and listen to feedback from others. The word humility comes from the Latin word “humus”, which means “earth” or “soil.” Just as the farmer who works the soil comes to know it completely, so too does God know us completely, inside and out.   

If we continue to discover ourselves, we are on the road to humility. Doing so keeps us “grounded” in the truth of who we are. We are the Lord’s creation. He is proud of us and wants us to celebrate and use the gifts that we have been given for the good of all creation. He also wants us to work on those areas of weakness that keep us from Him. When this practice becomes a natural part of our lives, we can become more humble, because we realize that we depend on God for everything.   

There is a wonderful saying that might help in this quest for greater humility: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.   

This week, let us put greater trust in God to show us what to do, and think of ourselves a little bit less.